10: The August 21, 2017 Solar Eclipse & The Sussex Beekeeper at the Dawn of Time

The occurrence of our recent total solar eclipse (the real deal pictured below) with all the attendant excitement reminds me of the theme of The Sussex Beekeeper at the Dawn of Time, Book 3 of MX's "Holmes Behind the Veil" series. The whole point of the book, indeed at the very heart of the book, is an analysis by Sherlock Holmes of the meaning of total solar eclipses. What follows are, first, a few items that support my hypothesis dealing with solar and lunar matters, and, second, a dramatic scenario from the book that is intended to demonstrate Sherlock Holmes' hypothesis along with his reasoning [found in Post 11] that supports his conclusions .

Photo by John Johnson/copyright © 2017 by John Johnson.

Recall that in 1965 Gerald S. Hawkins published his book titled Stonehenge Decoded, and in 1972 renowned cosmologist Sir Fred Hoyle published From Stonehenge to Modern Cosmology.

Hawkins used science, mathematics, and archeology to determine that the stones of Stonehenge are configured in a manner that could allow its designers to determine the occurrence of future solar eclipses. In other words, Hawkins strongly suspected that Stonehenge was built to be an observatory to keep track of the movements of the sun and moon for the principal purpose of knowing—knowing, not predicting—when solar eclipses would occur.

Hoyle used the same disciplines to build on Hawkins’ work by proposing scenarios, from a cosmologist’s view, illustrating why it might have been so important 5 thousand years ago to determine the occurrence of solar eclipses. Aside from the obvious fear factor, he pointed out the existence of nodes (invisible moving points in the sky), the substance and awareness of which the designers of Stonehenge would have positively needed to know and incorporate into their calculations for accuracy's sake when aligning their observatory’s titan stone blocks.

All this is important to the theme of The Sussex Beekeeper at the Dawn of Time because literature’s prototype rugged African explorer Allan Quatermain and Hans, his Hottentot (now termed “Khoisan”) companion since childhood, stumble upon in 1873 a vast secret way-before-its-time interferometer radio telescope that was built in months by Pope Pius IX, scientist James Maxwell, and engineer Impey Barbicane to “listen in” on a dying nova in the constellation of Aquila (see Post No. 12 for more of this plot point's backstory).

Despite all that expertise, time and money, the telescope utterly fails in its purpose. Instead it accidentally tunes into the Cosmic Background Radiation (CBR) left over from the Big Bang some 14 billion years ago. But the sounds of static, hissing, and popping heard through the the telescope's laboratory equipment mean nothing to those great minds of 1873, and the enterprise was deemed an irrevocable failure, resulting in the immediate destruction of the telescope and its infrastructure. [Note that the CBR was rediscovered, also accidentally, in the 1960s by Wilson and Penzias, which earned them the Nobel Prize in Physics.]

 

Until 2016, this was the only known drawing of Hans, by Hookway Cowles for the 1958 Macdonald reprint of The Ivory Child. Apparently, artists utterly ignored the character during his original appearances in six H. Rider Haggard novels from 1912 to 1926.

Yet, from a different perspective, the radio telescope functioned perfectly. It so happens that the static-like sound that was heard over the equipment in the telescope’s laboratory had elements distinctly similar to Hans’ native click language Khoi (which some etymologists conclude is not far removed from the original language spoken by early humans tens of thousands of years ago). Thus it happens that Hans alone hears and understands a message sent from the dawn of the universe some 14 billion years ago and made audible by this titanic “failed” telescope.

Through this fiction and literary device, the novel proposes that all this effort of building the telescope and its failure were intended by the "attentive, deliberate consciousness 'behind the veil'" that I espouse in my five principles (see  Principle 4: Elfin Coincidence) in order to deliver that message to Hans, who would of course be in the right place at the right time, and that the message buried in the CBR, which was vital enough to go to all this trouble, can be summarized as follows:

(1)  Total solar eclipses are, of course, the consequence of the earth's moon and the sun being coincidentally exactly the same relative sizes in our skies, and the probability of such an exact duplication in sizes—given their totally separate and unrelated diameters and distances from the earth—is exceedingly, even awesomely, remote in astronomical terms.*

(2)  And this circumstance of coincident identical relative sizes of the sun and moon is a long-standing fact of terrestrial reality due to that "attentive, deliberate consciousness 'behind the veil'" beginning the task 4-5 billion years ago, deliberately setting things up so that those two orbs would, after a very long while, eventually be seen to march across our skies by our remote ancestors, with the moon incredibly but regularly and perfectly blotting out the sun as a consequence….

(3)  In order to scare early Homo sapiens half to death to the extent that they strove to learn more about these terrifying occurrences through problem-solving….

(4)  Which resulted in the conception of and the building of Stonehenge and similar prehistoric observatories and calculators over much of the world….

(Counter clockwise from top) Stonehenge as it appears today (wikipedia/searchoflife.com) plus two artists' conceptions of how it may have looked 4.5 thousand years ago. (stone-circles.org.uk/ancient-origins.net)  Click on the image to enlarge. 

(5)  Which in turn further resulted in Homo sapiens developing cognitive skills that have held us in good stead ever since.

Naturally, for any of this to “work” as I’ve outlined, an "attentive, deliberate consciousness 'behind the veil'" must be presupposed.

All of the above is meant to share my simple for-me incontestable awareness that while the fabric of the enormous universe with all its stars and galaxies and enormous spaces seems to be materially devoid of consciousness, nonetheless there is something, somehow, somewhere that is able to take the time out of its busy schedule to both prod me to return to school [see blog post 4] and to situate the sun and moon in such a way as to kick start human intellectual and cultural development. I am calling that “something, somehow, somewhere”  an “attentive, deliberate consciousness 'behind the veil'” for want of anything better for the time being.

My novel is complex and convoluted and is intended to stimulate thinking in many arenas, but the concepts enumerated above are always at the foundation of my story, at the root of my privileged discovery of yet another previously unknown and exciting aspect of the Great Detective's life. 

I conclude this article by giving the father of "ratiocination," Edgar Allan Poe, the last word, an observation that touches on all of the above and also the postscript remarks [see below] by the Sussex Beekeeper in equal measure:

"There are few persons, even amongst the calmest thinkers, who have not occasionally been startled into a vague yet thrilling half-credence in the supernatural, by coincidences of so seemingly marvellous a character that, as mere coincidences, the intellect has been unable to receive them." 

—“The Mystery of Marie Rogêt”

*  [Yet ordinarily, modern inhabitants of this earth never consider this coincidence, always and utterly taking for granted the sun and moon and their movements, which is a foible or quality of modern life that mystery author G.K. Chesterton neatly sums up: "There is in life an element of elfin coincidence which people reckoning on the prosaic may perpetually miss." I think we can accept as a given that the people of Stonehenge and those that preceded that structure by tens of thousands of years were very aware of the movements of the sun, moon, and stars because, at the very least, the firmament constituted their ceiling, but also because their prehistoric situations demanded that they stay attuned to conditions that we are never aware of, never think about, and utterly take for granted.]

The End 
Of this blog post’s essay. 

There is, however, a postscript from the Sussex Beekeeper himself! Just click here or on the text below to read the Beekeeper's views.

Don’t take my word on anything that I suggest above; click here to read some thoughts on the same matters in the actual words of a certain “Sussex Beekeeper” that were transcribed in 1906 into the margins of Lady Luna Holmes Ragnall's 1884 diary, which came into my hands by a most circuitous and convoluted path:  [This extra step is necessitated by the MX publisher asking that my article be kept be short.]

Formal Notice: All images, quotations, and video/audio clips used in this blog and in its individual posts are used either with permissions from the copyright holders or through exercise of the doctrine of Fair Use as described in U.S. copyright law, or are in the public domain. If any true copyright holder (whether person[s] or organization) wishes an image or quotation or clip to be removed from this blog and/or its individual posts, please send a note with a clear request and explanation to eely84232@mypacks.net and your request will be gladly complied with as quickly as practical.